They would ask me what actors I saw in the roles. I would tell them, and they’d say “Oh that’s interesting.” And that would be the end of it.
--Elmore Leonard, in 2000, on the extent of his input for Hollywood's adaptation of his novels

Monday, March 2, 2015

Cara Black's "Murder on the Champ de Mars"

Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 15 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris. Murder on the Champ de Mars is the latest installment. Black has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime. With more than 400,000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Here Black shares her candidate to direct an adaptation of the new novel:

If they make my book into a film, here's who I'd like to play to direct the the movie: Sir Carol Reed. He directed The Third Man, and brought Graham Greene to Vienna and told him to write a screenplay with post war Vienna as a character. Greene did that in spades, the dark glistening cobbled streets at night, the sewers, the black market, all so evocative. I’ve read in interviews that Sir Carol Reed asked the characters to play their scenes in real locations and worked from those. He even gave free reign to Orson Welles who came up with the infamous line about the cuckoo clocks. It was in my mind when I wrote Murder on the Champs de Mars, how Sir Carol would direct on the dark Parisian streets, the sparkling Eiffel Tower almost shrouded by mist and the trees, and how he’d portray this part of Paris as a character.

“Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.”
--Louis de Bernières, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin